India's violence threatens new start to S. Asia peace

Martin Woollacott, Guardian News Service, London

There is no more ominously evocative symbol of communal conflict in the sub-continent than the corpse-packed train.

Scenes like that in Godhra, in Gujarat, this week were typical of partition days, as millions fled violence in their home areas only to suffer it again as the trains supposedly carrying them to safety were intercepted. The train under these circumstances is an awful instrument of worst impulses. It can deliver a mass of victims of one sect or ethnicity into the hands of predators from an opposing group in circumstances in which the first has no protection and the second can often act with total impunity.

Communal violence in India, as the radical journalist and academic Aijaz Ahmad has pointed out, has increased rather than diminished in every decade since the relatively trouble free period which followed partition. Even though the great troubles were fading in memory, the index of communal killings kept on creeping up. Not least in Gujarat, where the 1969 riots killed more than 1,000 people, and where there was serious violence in 1986 and again in the 1990s, when Christians as well as Muslims were targets. This week's Muslim attack on Hindus has to be seen against that regional background and history as well as in the larger national context. The victims "were not going for a benign assembly", Teesta Setalvad, the head of an anticommunalism group, told the Washington Post. "They were indulging in blatant and unlawful mobilization to build a temple and deliberately provoke the Muslims in India."

The Hindu nationalist groups (campaigning for the building of a temple on the site of the mosque demolished in Ayodhya in 1992 by mobs) have, in recent weeks, begun camping there; they have heaped up building materials and specially carved pillars for the reconstruction of the temple which the mosque centuries ago displaced. "Volunteers" from all over India have been going back and forth to Ayodhya in an attempt to bring pressure to bear on the prevaricating coalition government in Delhi to permit the work to begin, even though the courts are still weighing the issue.

That government is led by the same Bharatiya Janata party whose members and associates were prominent in the destruction of the mosque. But the BJP, shaky after a series of election defeats and facing the difficult consequences in office of what it wrought in opposition, twists in agonized fashion between appeasing its own more extreme supporters and trying to keep the lid on what could become much more widespread violence.

Everybody remembers that more than 2,000 people died in religious riots across the country after the Babri Masjid mosque was destroyed. The Godhra killings have already led to more deaths, and only the curfews swiftly put in place in 26 cities may have prevented others. The prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, is sufficiently concerned to have canceled his trip to Australia to attend the Commonwealth summit.

The political scientist Donald L Horowitz, in his book, The Deadly Ethnic Riot, on deadly ethnic and sectarian riots, entitles one of his chapters: Say It with Murder. Murder of this kind is a message about dominance, he argues, about asserting it or resisting it, a fearful dialogue about who shall prevail. His work examines the combination of cowardice and cruelty which characterizes such attacks. Those who kill rarely take real risks either in the form of retaliation from intended victims or interference from the authorities.

Given that many riots and attacks are sudden affairs, they pick with usually uncanny skill a time and place which offers maximum advantage. And they usually kill with a maximum of cruelty, revelling, Horowitz suggests, in "the mastery that reverses dishonor". The riot or attack of this kind is not something which can be understood as "a one-time event". The attackers see the episode as part of a long chain of provocation, threat, and crime against their community. Remorse, he notes, in a study which covers hundreds of cases around the world, is rarely encountered. Put simply, the attackers conceive of themselves as acting in self defense. In India, Muslims, who have of course been much less often the perpetrators than Hindus, may view their violence as resistance to growing Hindu domination. Those Hindus receptive to the view that the country's main aim should be to reverse the consequences of Muslim invasion and occupation and recover the national "essence", see another kind of threat. In every place there will in addition be an intricate history of local differences and disputes, and political exploitation of those differences and disputes.

It might be concluded that such violence in the sub-continent arises from the incompatibility of Hinduism, Islam, and other faiths, or at least their incompatibility as interpreted by some followers of those religions. But a very similar pattern can be seen in Pakistan, pitting different branches of Islam and different ethnic groups against each other. The day before Godhra, 11 Shi'ite Muslims died in an attack on a mosque in Rawalpindi.

Religious "armies" have sprung up in both countries. Communal violence in India, and the sectarian and ethnic violence in Pakistan which clearly has similar causes to that in the larger country, has always threatened larger consequences. That is particularly the case now, when there is a greater opportunity for a new start, in Kashmir, in Afghanistan, and in Indo- Pakistani relations generally, than there has been for years. It has arisen because of the conjuction between General Pervez Musharraf's change of course in internal politics, the intense interest of the United States in his success, and the strong desire of the Indian government for the best possible relations with America. That desire arises from the free market ideology of the BJP, from its worries about China, and from its wish to be seen as an accepted big power partner of the superpower.

The Indian government seems to have at first interpreted the changes in Pakistan as giving India the advantage, in that India was likely to get an end to Pakistani intervention in Kashmir without having to give anything in return. But as time passes it is clear that Musharraf will need a Kashmir settlement if he is to consolidate the new line and clear also that he could only accept one if it is a product of American mediation. Even though any conceivable settlement would give India much of what it wants, mediation is still anathema in New Delhi. A serious outbreak of communal violence could shift the political balance for the worse in both countries, making it harder for the Indian government to bite the bullet of mediation and emboldening the Pakistani militants who would be against any Kashmir settlement. That is why the fate of the Sabarmati Express in Godhra, and the subsequent killings in Ahmadabad, are more than a private tragedy.